Maemo + Moblin = MeeGo = Failure

Today, Nokia and Intel announced the merge of Maemo and Moblin into the MeeGo project. This is sad, because it will end the era of the Debian-based mobile operating system Maemo and replace it with a system using RPM and probably some other evil stuff as well. In fact, dpkg & apt-get where two of my main reasons to buy the N900.

And another question is why yet another name. Moblin was already a well-known name and they shouldn’t have changed the name just because they switch the servers and add some Nokia developers.

Furthermore, does this all mean that there will be no Maemo 6? What will happen to the Maemo users on the N900, will it be possible for them to use MeeGo?

Maybe this is the time to start a new project, Debian Mobile. Debian Mobile would take the MeeGo experience and apply it to a Debian system. This would probably the best mobile operating system ever, being backed by Debian’s large repositories with thousands of software packages.

Since Moblin 2 , Ubuntu is not longer be supported . Even the wonderful Mobile Image Creator(MIC) was suspended . It is replaced by Mobile Image Creator 2 which is for Fedora only which is less powerful than MIC 1

I wouldn’t lose hope (as a n900 owner and developer), rather without knowing anything about Moblin this sounded initially welcome to me. To me it’s most important that it’s an open (as open as possible) Linux platform.

While I’d prefer debs, I guess you always need to make compromises in a merge like this, and it’s quite plausible that this does more good than harm as a whole. It depends on what Moblin has to offer.

+1 to apt being the big thing. Not sure about this, but I have understood the most important drawback with rpms is the lack of the Suggests: and Recommends:. Not sure if this has been true for the last 10 years either 🙂

OTOH apt/deb is sometimes very slow because of the text format databases. (I’ve done a lot of profiling because it was _very_ slow on my old laptop. The biggest problem really is the text format db.) Don’t know if rpm is faster – I haven’t used rpm based systems for 10 years – but it could be. It’s easy to dismiss this with “how often do you upgrade your system?” and I’ve seen that done, but on mobile devices it could be more important.

Yum is ridiculously slow. It parses and reparses a bunch of xml every time it’s run. This was a huge problem on, for example, the OLPC XO-1. It’s been optimized since, but it’s still much slower than apt.

> Not sure about this, but I have understood the most
> important drawback with rpms is the lack of the
> Suggests: and Recommends:. Not sure if this has
> been true for the last 10 years either

RPM also supports this, at least on openSUSE.

> OTOH apt/deb is sometimes very slow because of the
> text format databases.

dpkg has some problems because of the high number of files in /var/lib/dpkg/info, apart from that everything is fine. But according to Bug#561104, this should be fixed in an 1.15.6 release.

> It’s easy to dismiss this with “how often do you
> upgrade your system?” and I’ve seen that done,
> but on mobile devices it could be more important.

BTW, I upgrade 2-3 times per day. Anyway, on mobile devices the number of packages is roughly 10% of the number of packages in Debian; thus reducing the number of files to load. Furthermore, mobile devices use flash storage which means that the reads are much faster anyway.

Nokia bought Trolltech (the company behind Qt). My guess is that one reason to push Qt for Maemo, which they were planning to do anyway, is to achieve and maintain toolkit compatibility between Maemo and other, older Nokia’s platforms like S60 (Symbian). And Qt really is quite nice and advanced, unless you are overly allergic to C++ or the moc preprocessor thingy.

I’m starting to getting fed up of these kind of comments:
“-Oh no, I don’t want to try Qt, because all Qt apps looks bad and they are also stupid.
-I hate Qt, KDE, and RPM. That’s my mission in life, to hate them all!
-What’s important is Gnome, apt and GTK. If I can’t use those, I will surely change to Mac or Windows, because those are the important parts of linux.
-Etc……”

Yeah, I know, most of you aren’t that bad. But after visiting some blogs and reading the comments, I’m starting to be sad. Why do people get so angry over a thing like deb vs rpm? It’s a detail. It’s nothing! If you can use one, you’ll be a confident user of the other in notime.

This is certainly upsetting news for many; arguably maemo was the most promising open source operating system for phones and internet tablets. Any word on what is likely to happen to mer (http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer) and – more importantly -ofono (http://ofono.org/)? Ofono is a Nokia/Intel collaboration already…

I think it’s important to realise that this development could be for the best; as has been pointed out the main cause of the upset is change rather than what the results of the change might be.

This is perhaps symptomatic of an issue in the mobile open source arena. Be they open source or otherwise, the development of these operating systems is very much in the hands of corporations rather than the community.

Jesus christ, people. It’s open source. Get past your sentimental attachments to either platform and roll with it. This is still a lot better than the freaky, sandboxed Big Brother environment of Android – not to mention *shiver* Windows Mobile.

Nothing is set in stone. If you liked something in Maemo or Moblin, fine: go push for it in MeeGo.

I am debian fan. I prefer to have debian as my client and server OS. The reason is simple, i am use to apt and dpkg. But I do not have any strong reason to refuse rmp based OS like RedHat or MeeGo. Because #1 i am concerned to Linux instead of their package management. #2. As far as qt integration is concerned. I guess this is good decision to have standard application for all os. This will not only gives performance gain (Compare to python like langs) but also provides portability of of an app on different operating systems.